AMERICA

America

America

The interpreter begins by hermeneutic self-alienation from his or her present standpoint as something given but not concretely understood. In the place of that present standpoint the interpreter ideally identifies and empathetically adopts the most remote possible standpoint in his or her dialectical past. The method then allows that standpoint, due to its internal incoherence, to transcend itself in favor of a less incoherent standpoint, which then yields to an even less incoherent standpoint, and so on until interpretation recovers the present standpoint no longer as merely given but now as reconstructed and understood as a product of its dialectical past. ...